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swampthinker

GCP revenue rises from $3Bn to $4.6Bn, but how does that track against AWS and MSFT?

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MSFT reported 51% revenue growth for Azure, so it's pretty constant:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2021-Q4...

Not sure what the actual number is but they did report 50% growth for last quarter

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-21-Q3/p...

> Server products and cloud services revenue increased 26% (up 23% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 50% (up 46% in constant currency)

edit: my link was for the quarter before but the actual previous quarter (that ended today) still reports 51% growth

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2021-Q4...

> Server products and cloud services revenue increased 34% (up 29% in constant currency) driven by Azure revenue growth of 51% (up 45% in constant currency)

Rather than revenue increase, the more interesting thing seems to be the significant fall in loss. Since they are close to profitability, it might allow them to be more aggressive on pricing.

Note: that also include all Google Workspace related income.

Note #2: Microsoft also reports office 365 as part of its cloud revenue.

I don't think that's the case as per the press release: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2021-Q4...

> Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes was $14.7 billion

> Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $17.4 billion

The first includes Office 365 products and the second includes Azure.

Several years ago they were lumped into the same figure but it's pretty clearly separated out in this reporting. Whether or not reporting on "the cloud" is a function of these two areas isn't something I'm aware of, but the source document doesn't indicate as much.

From a UX perspective I find GCP much better than Azure but I fear that Alphabet will get bored of GCP given how far behind AWS and Azure they are.

If anything, Alphabet will likely spin GCP off of Google and make it its own dedicated company under the Alphabet umbrella.

Alphabet needs multiple revenue streams and Cloud is positioned to be a major one.

Here in 10 years maybe, the coupling between Google and it's infrastructure is like the head over body. Cutting cloud out surely delights TK, but before that the other SVPs will make sure TK got to rebuild it's engineering workforce and leave the exiting on themselves. In other words, Google is totally fine to retain the core of GCP.

I might be wrong though

I think the bigger issue would be taking the tech developed by Google and porting it over to GCP as a separate company (i.e. like they did kubernetes, bigquery, etc.)

Alphabet Cloud and Google could work out some easy service agreement. Worked for Coca Cola and Coca Cola Bottling company.

You cannot build a Borg over kuernets, like you cannot build baremetal VM over VM. One can get the abstraction. But the cost would be totally messed up, and some of the performance characteristics would be so bad that the whole ads business ecosystem probably would collapse.

GCP can build on top of Google tech, but not the reverse.

Understandable to be wary of anything Google offers given their track record, but GCP is way too big and strategic for them to get bored of it.

Are they really that into it though? Azure is clearly do or die for Microsoft. Amazon pioneered AWS so lots of true believers there.

GCP (ie, customer facing piece) feels a bit like a me too thing no? Glad it exists to keep AWS a bit honest (Azure / Microsoft really has a different sales channel to me).

> GCP (ie, customer facing piece) feels a bit like a me too thing no?

"Me-too" or not, it is approaching $20b/year in revenue, growing quickly, and about to the point where it could start throwing off a lot of cash.

I don't know how you quantify how "into it" they are, but seems like they are at least a little bit?

Historically their (internal) culture was a monorepo, keep things clean, refactor, OK to break things because you could also refactor the entire code / API.

Sounds kind of awesome!

The problem is externally this is total madness. You CANNOT just keep on breaking everything on your customers.

I was very early on both AWS and GCP. There is literally no comparison between these companies in terms of cloud offerings and how much has been blown up, neglected etc on the GCP side vs AWS.

This cloud stuff is going to be less "cool" than google is used to - it's going to need them to carry around some older API's (ie, technical debt) etc etc so they don't constantly screw their customers. So it just doesn't feel like its in their DNA.

AWS is all about making customer happy -> that work well.

Google is about cool tech and doing the new things -> that doesn't work well.

Maybe spin GCP off with some old industry folks mixed into the new hotness?

Yes. They are very ‘into it.’ I’ve spoken with plenty of execs at Google Cloud to know that it is a serious piece of Google’s business, that they are committed to GCP, and customers have no reason to doubt its longevity. This coming from someone who is known as Google’s biggest critic. (@killedbygoogle)

yes, it took a while for google to realize this but they are in cloud for the long haul. They will continue to be #3 for the foreseeable future, as nothing in their pricing or tech really makes them the preferred provider.

I love they are around as a check on AWS. I do think they are sorting things out a bit just to get the money (which is huge).

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/google-cloud-offers-...

Google Cloud's 2021 revenue is larger than YouTube's 2020 revenue. Nobody gets bored of $18B ARR that's growing at 50%/year.

I've been seeing rehashes of this comment for ~2 years at this point, and it just gets more unreasonable with each quarter. When will this tired meme die?

> When will this tired meme die?

Well there was a well-sourced story about a year and a half ago that Google leaders had a huge debate about whether to kill their cloud business, and gave it until 2023 to pass either AWS or Azure. So, maybe the tired meme will die in 2024?

Note that there have not been similar reports about Amazon or Microsoft. Leaders at those companies don’t seem to be agonizing over whether to stay in the cloud business.

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